2of5Josh Martinez opened the Goro & Gun after-work spot in downtown Houston, but has left to start a new, fried-chicken-centric restaurant in the Heights with Paul Sedillo. It will be called The Chicken Ranch, named after the famous Texas brothel.Photo: Michael Paulsen, Staff

3of5Longtime Houston television reporter and personality Marvin Zindler was the reporter who broke the story that ultimately caused the closing of The Chicken Ranch brothel in La Grange years ago. Restaurateurs Josh Martinez and Paul Sedillo are naming their new restaurant after the brothel and say there will definitely be some Zindler memorabilia in the decor.Photo: PAT SULLIVAN, STF

4of5Marvin Zindler, early 1950s.

5of5Edna Milton was the madame of the famous Chicken Ranch brothel in La Grange. Later the building was turned into a restaurant, and Milton was a hostess there.

This fall, Houston's fried-chicken scene promises to get considerably more interesting. Food-truck pioneer Josh Martinez will partner with local food and wine enthusiast Paul Sedillo to open the Chicken Ranch on North Main in the Heights, with a soft-opening target date of late September.

It's the first project for the duo's new Spindle Peak restaurant group. Martinez and Sedillo, a passionate cook who spent his early working years in a professional kitchen, had talked about working together for years. It started from the moment they were introduced by Hubcap Grill's Ricky Craig at Grand Prize Bar - the industry hangout and general synergy cauldron where Martinez's food trailer, the Modular, staged well-received pop-ups, and whose owners went on to help Martinez open downtown izakaya Goro & Gun.

The Chicken Ranch, named after the notorious Central Texas bordello, will be tightly focused on fried chicken and what Sedillo laughingly terms "super bad-ass sides" in a Southern comfort style.

Sedillo says that champagne will be part of the equation, in the form of "bubbles from all over the globe," and that he and Martinez aim "to do low-fi food at a high-fi level."

To that end, Martinez has been doing fried-chicken research and development for months now, both in Houston and New Orleans, where he visited such temples as Coop's Place and Willie Mae's, a James Beard Foundation America's Classic winner.

Martinez says unlike most of the chicken he has encountered locally, the Chicken Ranch's birds will be fried to order rather than sitting around under warming lamps. He and Sedillo aim to challenge fried-chicken icons such as the Barbecue Inn, Frenchy's and Max's Wine Dive, where the fried-chicken-and-champagne motif took wing back when Jonathan Jones presided as opening chef.

Martinez's Asian-style fried chicken wings were justifiably famous at Goro & Gun, which he recently departed to work on this project. At the Chicken Ranch, however, he'll be working in a purely Southern mode. He's experimenting with brining techniques, which he thinks are key to producing a juicy and flavorful bird, and he's juggling sous vide brining and cooking times, as well as frying temperatures, to find what he considers to be the perfect formula.

It's the sous vide element that he hopes will give their chickens the edge. "When I started working on wings way back then, I found that doing a specific brine under vacuum and then cooking sous vide could speed up the final product," Martinez explains. Without sous vide, frying a chicken to order could take 15 to 20 minutes. Using sous vide, he estimates that it will take 6 to 10 minutes from flouring the chicken and putting it in the fryer to putting it on the table.

He and Sedillo haven't settled on sourcing for their chickens yet. They're still testing product, and it will be interesting to see whether they pick mass-produced or free-range birds, with their very different price points. Whatever they choose, the fried chicken will be available in a regular or spicy Louisiana-style version.

The pair has found a suitable small restaurant space on the fringe of Sunset Heights, where the Greater Heights restaurant boom is just now picking up speed, and they plan to announce the address as soon as the final lease details are worked out.

There will be craft beer on tap as well as bubbles to go with the fried chicken, and Sedillo hopes to pour a carefully curated selection of brews unusual to the market. Local beer guru Kyle White will help with the beer portfolio.

And yes, there will be biscuits. "Imagine a biscuit chicken sandwich," daydreams Sedillo, whose idea of the ultimate Chicken Ranch combo is "three pieces and a split."

Perhaps there will even be fried-chicken skin on the menu. Martinez is currently playing around with that manifestation of the Southern crackling.

If Sedillo has his way, there also will be a black velvet painting of Marvin Zindler, the late Houston TV reporter who exposed the original Chicken Ranch in La Grange back in 1973, which ultimately shut the brothel down.

Alison Cook – a two-time James Beard Award winner for restaurant criticism and an M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing award recipient – has been reviewing restaurants and surveying the dining scene for the Houston Chronicle for 12 years.